The James Bond Songs

Pop Anthems of Late Capitalism

Adrian Daub and Charles Kronengold

Illustrates how our conception of what a pop song is has changed over time

Tells the story of a cultural property caught between a fixed brand aesthetic and a pop-music landscape that won't stand still

Brief thematic chapters for the general reader rather than the cultural historian

The James Bond Songs

Pop Anthems of Late Capitalism

Adrian Daub and Charles Kronengold

Description

Starting with 1964's Goldfinger, every James Bond film has followed the same ritual, and so has its audience: after an exciting action sequence the screen goes black and the viewer spends three long minutes absorbing abstract opening credits and a song that sounds like it wants to return to 1964. In The James Bond Songs authors Adrian Daub and Charles Kronengold use the genre to trace not only a changing cultural landscape, but also evolving conceptions of what a pop song is. They argue that the story of the Bond song is the story of the pop song more generally, and perhaps even the story of its end.

Each chapter discusses a particular segment of the Bond canon and contextualizes it in its era's music and culture. But the book also asks how Bond and his music reflected and influenced our feelings about such topics as masculinity, race, money, and aging. Through these individual pieces the book presents the Bond song as the perfect anthem of late capitalism. The Bond songs want to talk about the fulfillment that comes from fast cars, shaken Martinis and mindless sex, but their unstable speakers, subjects, and addressees actually undercut the logic of the lifestyle James Bond is sworn to defend. The book is an invitation to think critically about pop music, about genre, and about the political aspects of popular culture in the twentieth century and beyond.

The James Bond Songs

Pop Anthems of Late Capitalism

Adrian Daub and Charles Kronengold

Table of Contents

James Bond and the End(s) of the Pop SongChapter 1: "At Skyfall": The Bond-Song, Repression, and RepetitionChapter 2: "A Golden Girl Knows": The Ballads of James BondChapter 3: "You Only Live Twice": James Bond and (his) AgeChapter 4: "When You've Got a Job to Do": The 70sChapter 5: "We're an All Time High": James Bond, Pop, and the Endless 1970sChapter 6: Looking the Part: James Bond's New Wave YearsChapter 7: "Your Life is a Story I Have Already Written": The Gay Panic YearsChapter 8: "Close My Body Now": Bond's Traumas and the Compulsion to Repeat James Bond Will Return In....Index

The James Bond Songs

Pop Anthems of Late Capitalism

Adrian Daub and Charles Kronengold

Author Information

Adrian Daub is Associate Professor of German Studies at Stanford University and author of three books about music and culture.

Charles Kronengold is Assistant Professor of Music at Stanford University and author of a forthcoming book on musical genres of the 1970s.

The James Bond Songs

Pop Anthems of Late Capitalism

Adrian Daub and Charles Kronengold

Reviews and Awards

"Critique of ideology at its best: taking our pleasures at their most stupid and marginal, and discerning in them echoes of global social and ideological antagonisms. A must for all those who believe that we really live in post-ideological times!" --Slavoj Zizek

"In prose that purrs like a Bond girl, Daub and Kronengold tell a remarkable story not just of these curious songs but of popular music since the early 1960s. A terrific history!" --Alice Echols, Professor of History and Gender Studies, The University of Southern California

"This refreshingly unique study chronicles Bond songs as part of pop music and apart from it, within the Bond movies and apart from them, imagining hip futures while desperately holding onto anachronistic visions of empire." --Dana Polan, Cinema Studies, New York University

"A book as sophisticated as a shaken martini, as clever as Q's gadgets, as zippy as an Aston Martin, as razor sharp as Goldfinger's laser, as gorgeous as Shirley Bassey's voice, and as enthralling as any Bond movie I've ever seen." --Alexander Rehding, Harvard University

"The James Bond Songs, especially good at dissecting the music and its place in the films, is most interesting when it's fleshing out the Bond character and his era. More than a book for music lovers and Bond devotees, it's a wise statement of how commerce tries to pass itself off as art." --Pasatiempo

"The most scintillatingly analytical book on music I've read since Robert Cantwell's When We Were Good: The Folk Revival, and that came out in 1996... what makes the book sing is Daub and Kronengold's rare sense of songs thinking, as creations that acquire their own agency, and their acute ability to put flesh on the bones of the late-capitalist shibboleth." --Greil Marcus, Pitchfork

The James Bond Songs

Pop Anthems of Late Capitalism

Adrian Daub and Charles Kronengold

From Our Blog

If you're getting ready for the new Bond movie'and its recently released James Bond song'you might want to sift through the history of this 50-year-old franchise and think about your favorite Bond films and songs. But how many songs do you remember once you get past 'Goldfinger' and 'Live and Let Die'? We dug into the ones you might not recall, and those we believe deserve another listen. Here are our top 10.

Very soon now, we'll find out who sings the next James Bond song. SPECTRE, the superspy's twenty-fifth outing, will be coming out in the fall. But the song will be more like the thirtieth or so, depending on how you count.

Now's the moment to be a fan of the Bond songs. SPECTRE, the new film, comes out this November. That means we'll hear an official unofficial leak of the title song sometime this summer. Everybody's been guessing who the singer is. Twitter says it'll be Sam Smith or Lana Del Rey. Sam Smith says it isn't him and claims that he 'heard Ellie Goulding was going to do it.' The Telegraph wants to know why no one has considered Mumford and Sons (don't answer that). Even Vegas is paying attention. Who would you put your money on?